TOM UTLEY: Yes, I'm a hypocrite who stopped going to mass at 13, but I'm certain church is the best place to learn right from wrong

My original plan for last week was to write about a survey from Manchester University, which had found that people who visit a place of worship regularly are less likely to commit low-level crimes than those who don’t.

But then I thought this was so unsurprising — so bleeding obvious, not to put too fine a point on it — it wasn’t worth wasting a drop of ink on discussing it.

My feelings were summed up in a sarcastic remark appended by ‘Peter, Harrogate’ to the story on Mail Online: ‘Researchers have also discovered that people who enjoy swimming in the sea are more likely to get wet than those who hate water.’

We all knew, without having to be told by a PhD student from Manchester, that churchgoers are markedly less likely than Sunday morning lie-abeds to indulge in shoplifting, drug abuse or music piracy

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realised it may be a more interesting finding than it first appeared.

Have parents, teachers and politicians been wilfully overlooking what must surely be the most potent weapon in the battle against crime, even though it’s been staring us all in the face since the day we were dangled over the baptismal font (or not, as is increasingly the case)?

Of course, many will be quick to point out the logical flaw in my argument.

Yes, we all knew, without having to be told by a PhD student from Manchester, that churchgoers are markedly less likely than Sunday morning lie-abeds to indulge in shoplifting, drug abuse or music piracy (though I’ve met some very naughty worshippers in my time, I can tell you).

Poverty

But it doesn’t necessarily follow that church-going — in which I include synagogue-going and mosque-going — cuts crime.

Indeed, my immediate reflection on reading the report last week was that the sort of people who go to church these days tend to be goody-goodies in the first place, drawn to the pews by the same moral impulse that makes them inclined to obey the law.

This is what persuaded me to write instead about the only-very-slightly less obvious discovery that drinking too much alcohol does long-term damage to the memory.

But it wasn’t always so. In the days before organised religion went out of fashion and the social pressure to attend church was much more powerful than it is today, the pews were crammed with people of all sorts, not just the firm believers you would naturally expect to obey the law. Yet the undeniable fact is that Britons in general were much more law-abiding then than they are today.

In 1932, for example, only 208,175 crimes of any kind were recorded in England and Wales. Yet this was during the Great Depression — a time of real poverty (as opposed to the sort Ed Miliband cited in the Commons this week, when he claimed preposterously that 13 million Britons live ‘in poverty’ in 2014).

The tally of crimes recorded in England and Wales came to a blistering 3.7 million in 2013

Now fast forward to yesterday, when the Home Office announced the comparable figure for 2013. The tally of crimes recorded in England and Wales came to a blistering 3.7 million — and that was even after the figures had been systematically fiddled to minimise the scale of the problem, as senior officers have confessed and the Office for National Statistics has confirmed.

True, the population has almost doubled since 1932, and politicians have been busy inventing new crimes, from driving without a seatbelt to smoking in the pub. But this doesn’t begin to explain why the crime rate has increased more than tenfold (and that’s discounting yesterday’s Crime Survey of England and Wales, which estimated there were eight million offences against households and adults last year).

You might think that in the desperate year of 1932, when so many were barefoot and hungry, the temptation to commit crimes would have been irresistible. Yet overwhelmingly, the population resisted it ten times more stoically than the well-shod, well-fed Britons of today. Why?

Again, it’s not strictly logical to say that because crime was much rarer when church attendance was much higher, the one fact follows necessarily from the other. But surely it cannot be altogether fanciful to suggest there may be a connection between the two?

Damnation

I’m not suggesting it was fear of eternal damnation that kept my grandparents’ generation on the straight and narrow. Indeed, I strongly suspect that most of them had quite as much difficulty believing in the literal truth of Hell as the majority do today.

But from my own experience of being marched off to Mass every Sunday of my childhood, I can testify that regular churchgoing does have the subtle effect on even the most Godless mind of making one look at the world through a moral prism of right and wrong.

But in the words of Francois de la
Rochefoucauld, which I never tire of quoting: ‘Hypocrisy is the homage
vice pays to virtue.’ And it’s all the better for that

I should admit at once that I write as a raging hypocrite, who gave up going to church regularly when I was about 13, just as soon as my mother gave up the unequal struggle to force me out of bed on Sunday mornings. And I never made any effort to encourage our four sons to go (I left that, like so much else, to my wife).

But in the words of Francois de la Rochefoucauld, which I never tire of quoting: ‘Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.’ And it’s all the better for that.

I should also stress that I’ve often done things that I know perfectly well are wrong. But what I find so striking in my sons’ generation is that many among them who have never darkened a church doorstep in their lives, except to attend weddings or funerals, don’t even put the question to themselves: ‘Is the course of action I’m proposing right or wrong?’

Like MPs fiddling their expenses, they ask instead: ‘What are my chances of getting away with it?’ And if the answer they give themselves is anywhere between 95 and 100 per cent, they reckon that’s the clincher. No further objections.

I vividly remember trying to explain to one of my sons’ friends — a very polite and pleasant middle-class lad — that it was wrong to download music without paying for it. He was simply baffled, telling me: ‘But there’s no way you can be caught.’

Fraudulent

Then there was his other schoolmate, from an equally nice family, who thought he was just being helpful when he told me there was no need to give my son money for a train ticket, because they always left the side gate to the station open at that time at night and no one ever checked at the other end.

And don’t get me started on motorists who put in vast, fraudulent claims against my insurance after the gentlest conceivable touch on their bumpers (a very sore point with me at the moment, as I may have mentioned before).

As so often, P. G. Wodehouse put it brilliantly when he said: ‘Golf . . . is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well.’

Whether or not God exists, isn't it in everyone¿s interests to encourage as many people as possible to go to church?

Remove even God’s restraining influence from the equation, and what’s left to stop any of us from sneaking the ball onto the fairway?

We can argue until the cows come home about whether or not the Almighty exists. And I’m not denying for a moment that countless non-believing, non-churchgoers have a finely tuned sense of right and wrong, while many regular worshippers are less than model citizens. The ‘Crystal Methodist’ Rev Paul Flowers springs to mind.

All I’m saying is that the habit of attending a place of worship — hate preachers aside — is almost certainly a significant factor in turning people away from crime.

So whether or not God exists, isn’t it in everyone’s interests to encourage as many people as possible to go to church?

Why does almost every modern politician seem embarrassed even to talk about something so obvious?